Free Movies and Other Things You Didn’t Know

According to a recent poll of my readers, there seems to be a sections of the TAPA website you might not be aware of. Also, since most of you are into movies, I thought I’d give you some tips on how to get movies for free (at least if you’re in LA).

Where the Jobs at?

A lot of you come here looking for jobs, which is totally understandable. It’s very competitive out there.

I’ve actually got three pages for that:

First, there’s the UTA joblist. It gets updated a couple of times a week, usually. (In fact, I have to update it later today.)

My jobs page, which consists of job notices that have been sent directly to me.

ZipRecruiter, which has a surprising number of production-related jobs. That gets updated all the time.

How Can I Help You?

Production resumes are a weird beast. They’re not meant to look the way traditional resumes do. It’s more like a credit list than anything.

I recently raised my prices, but since many of you weren’t even aware of the service, I’ve decided to offer a deal until the end of the week. If you mention this blog post before the end of this weekend, I’ll give you the old rates: $100 for the resume, $100 for your cover letter, or $150 for both.

There’s also a glossary page. I’m working on expanding this with more entries, so please be patient.

Freebies

If you’re new to LA, you might not be familiar with the concept of “test screenings.” The studios, being the scared business people that they are, don’t trust filmmakers to make a good movie. They insist on playing the movie in front of a real audience ahead of time, just to see how the audience reacts.

There are a few companies that help the studios run the screenings. Not all of them are in LA, either, so even if you’re not in Hollywood, I recommend checking them out, just in case.

The Q&A – this is just in LA. Not only are there free screenings, but there’s a Q&A with the writers after.

Now, the big problem with most of these is, you have to stand in line. Like, a long time. You can’t just show up at showtime and expect to get in, sadly. So, hopefully you have an extra hour to spend hanging out, in exchange for the free movie.

Lastly, if you have a library card, you can stream movies for free. Totally legally and everything:

Kanopy – This has the Critereon collection, and I can’t recommend it enough.

Hoopla – I’ll be honest, I mostly use this for the free comic books. Still, there’s some good movies on there.

Overdrive – Okay, some of these movies are really not good, but they also have a massive collection of audiobooks, which comes in handy when you’re on a long run.